Ghosted

by Jenn Ashworth

I understood her motivation: a strange, self-cancelling urge to parade your darkest acts anonymously, to be there and not there, to linger at the scene of your own crime, pointing out the incriminating evidence while protesting your innocence.

Eddie shuddered. He considered infidelity to be only a venial sin; sex was a healthy, vigorous activity, best enjoyed regularly – rather like PE. But fucking someone from HR? Unacceptable.

There’s a way of looking at films and books that counts how many times women talk to each other about something other than a man. Useful, no doubt, but it does not take into account the fact that the only time women can talk about the wounds and pains men have caused them is when the men are out of the room and they’re alone together, on a headland, watching the colour of the sea and the clouds gather and blow inland.